About

Barrie Risman is widely regarded as one of Canada’s most highly skilled yoga educators, teacher–trainers and mentors. Her best-selling book, Evolving Your Yoga: Ten Principles for Enlightened Practice, is a guide for teachers and continuing students to deepen, expand, and integrate the benefits of yoga in their lives. She’s the creator of The Skillful Yogi, an online practice and study community of yoga students and teachers from around the globe.

Barrie is well known for her ability to convey the essence of the wisdom teachings of yoga with exceptional clarity, insight, and relevance to students of all levels and from all walks of life. As unpretentious and down-to-earth as she is wise and inspiring, Barrie teaches with a remarkable combination of rigor and challenge balanced with sensitivity, humor, and compassion.

Her events weave together the technical precision of refined alignment-based practice with an ever-present awareness of the great wisdom of yoga philosophy distilled from decades of intensive study and practice.

Teaching for more than two decades, Barrie shares the depth of her experience and knowledge to reveal a uniquely accessible, authentic and integrated approach to yoga. She empowers students with tools to deepen their understanding and inspires them to embrace asana as a path for expansive self-discovery and inner growth.

A seasoned trainer and mentor of new teachers, Barrie serves on several teacher-training faculties including HappyTree Yoga in Montreal, PranaShanti Yoga Centre of Ottawa, and Shakti Yoga in Geneseo, New York. She is the creator of professional development courses, retreats and mentoring programs for yoga teachers.

Barrie was the co-founder and co-director of Shri Yoga, Montreal’s seminal place for the practice of Alignment-based, Heart-centered Hatha Yoga from 2011-2016. A certified Anusara Yoga teacher, she was a Senior Anusara Yoga teacher and teacher trainer from 2003-2012. Barrie led Anusara Yoga events throughout Canada, the US and internationally and served on the Anusara Yoga Teacher Certification Committee from 2006-2012, mentoring new teachers toward certification.

She has been a dedicated student of Iyengar Yoga for more than 25 years. She continues to study regularly with her primary mentor, Kevin Gardiner, a senior Iyengar Yoga teacher and co-founder of the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York.

From 1997-2003, Barrie served as a full-time staff member for the SYDA Foundation in India and the US, immersed in the study and practice of the traditional yogic disciplines.

Barrie is the proud Co-creator and former Co-director of the World Spine Care Yoga Project, whose mission is to bring the benefits of posture, breathing and mindfulness as a tool for pain management and active self-care to low mobility populations around the world.